Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 01: The Years of Persecution

by Saul Friedlander

  Over the preceding weeks and months Hitler had mentioned any number of possibilities regarding the ultimate fate of the German (and more often than not, of the European) Jews. On September 20, 1938, he had told the Polish ambassador to Berlin, Jósef Lipski, that he was considering sending the Jews to some colony in cooperation with Poland and Romania. The same idea, specifying Madagascar, had come up in the Bonnet-Ribbentrop talks and, earlier, in Göring’s addresses of November 12 and December 6. (The Generalfeldmarschall had explicitly referred to Hitler’s ideas on this issue.) To South African Defense Minister Oswald Pirow, Hitler declared on November 24, 1938, that “some day, the Jews will disappear from Europe.” On January 5, 1939, Hitler stated to Polish Foreign Minister Beck that had the Western democracies had a better understanding of his colonial aims, he would have allocated an African territory for the settlement of the Jews; in any case, he made it clear once more that he was in favor of sending the Jews to some distant country. Finally, on January 21, a few days before his speech, Hider told Czech Foreign Minister Franti$$$ek Chvalkovsky that the Jews of Germany would be “annihilated,” which in the context of his declaration seemed to mean their disappearance as a community; he added again that the Jews should be shipped off to some distant place. A more ominous tone appeared in this conversation when Hider mentioned to Chvalkovsky that if the Anglo-Saxon countries did not cooperate in shipping out and taking care of the Jews, they would have their deaths on their consciences.7 If Hitler was mainly thinking in terms of deporting the Jews from Europe to some distant colony, which at this stage was clearly a completely vague plan, then the threats of extermination uttered in the January 30 speech at first appear unrelated. But the background needs to be considered once more.

  On the face of it, Hitler’s speech seems to have had a twofold context. First, as already mentioned, British opposition to the appeasement policy, and the strong American reactions to Kristallnacht, would have sufficed to explain his multiple references to Jewish-capitalist warmongering. Second, it is highly probable that in view of his project of dismembering what remained of Czecho-Slovakia, and of the demands he was now making on Poland, Hitler was aware of the possibility that the new international crisis could lead to war (he had mentioned this possibility in a speech given a few weeks before, in Saarbrücken).8 Thus Hitler’s threats of extermination, accompanied by the argument that his past record proved that his prophecies were not to be made light of, may have been aimed in general terms at weakening anti-Nazi reactions at a time when he was preparing for his most risky military-diplomatic gamble. More precisely the leader of Germany may have expected that these murderous threats would impress the Jews active in European and American public life sufficiently to reduce what he considered to be their warmongering propaganda.

  The relevance of Hitler’s speech to the immediate international context appears to be confirmed by a Wilhelmstrasse memorandum sent on January 25, 1939, to all German diplomatic missions, regarding “the Jewish question as a factor of foreign policy during the year 1938.” The memorandum linked the realization of “the great German idea,” which had occurred in 1938 (the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland), with steps for the implementation of a solution of the Jewish question. The Jews were the main obstacles to the German revival; the rise of German strength was therefore necessarily linked to the elimination of the Jewish danger from the German national community. The memorandum, which reaffirmed Jewish emigration as the goal of German policy, identified the United States as the headquarters of Jewish international action and President Roosevelt, notoriously surrounded by Jews, as the force attempting to organize international pressure on Germany both in general political terms and also in order to ensure that Jewish emigrants from Germany could benefit from the full recovery of Jewish assets.9 Thus it seems that for the Wilhelmstrasse and for Hitler, the Western democracies and the United States in particular were temporarily taking the place of Bolshevik Russia as the seat of international Jewish power and therefore of militant hostility to the rise of German power.

  It was precisely because Hitler believed in Jewish influence in the capitalist world that, in its immediate context, his speech may be considered as yet another exercise in blackmail. The Jews of Germany (and of Europe) were to be held hostage in case their warmongering brethren and assorted governments were to instigate a general war. This idea, which had been aired by Das Schwarze Korps on October 27, 1938, in an article entitled “An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth,” was circulating in Germany during these very months. On November 3 Das Schwarze Korps returned to the same theme: “If the Jews declare war on us—as they have already done [in the past]—we will treat the Jews who live among us as the citizens of a belligerent state…. The Jews of Germany are part of world Jewry, and they partake in the responsibility for everything that world Jewry initiates against Germany, as they are a guarantee against the harm that world Jewry causes to us and still wants to inflict upon us.”10 The idea of holding the Jews hostage did not necessarily contradict the urgent desire to expel them from Germany. As has been seen, Hitler himself evoked this idea in his conversation with Goebbels on July 24, 1938. In his December 6 address to the Gauleiters, Göring returned to it as part of his emigration plan. Moreover, during the negotiations between Schacht and Rublee, which will be discussed below, the plan submitted by the Reichsbank president foresaw the departure of 150,000 Jews with their dependents over the following three years, whereas some 200,000 Jews, mainly the elderly, would stay behind in order to ensure international Jewry’s positive behavior toward the Reich.

  It would be a mistake, however, to consider Hitler’s January 30 speech merely in its short-term, tactical context. The wider vistas may have been part calculated pressure, part uncontrolled fury, but they may well have reflected a process consistent with his other projects regarding the Jews, such as their transfer to some remote African territory. This was, in fact, tantamount to a search for radical solutions, a scanning of extreme possibilities. Perceived in such a framework, the prophecy about extermination becomes one possibility among others, neither more nor less real than others. And—like the hostage idea—the possibility of annihilation was in the air.

  Himmler’s speech of November 8, 1938, and its implicit corollaries have already been mentioned. A few weeks later, in an article published on November 24, Das Schwarze Korps was far more explicit. After announcing the need for the total segregation of the Jews of Germany in special areas and special houses, the SS periodical went one step further: The Jews could not continue in the long run to live in Germany: “This stage of development [of the situation of the Jews] will impose on us the vital necessity to exterminate this Jewish sub-humanity, as we exterminate all criminals in our ordered country: by the fire and the sword! The outcome will be the final catastrophe for Jewry in Germany, its total annihilation.”11

  It is not known if it was this article in Das Schwarze Korps that incited the American consul general in Berlin, Raymond Geist, to write in early December that the Nazi objective was the “annihilation” of the Jews,12 or whether foreign observers sensed, at the inner core of the regime, the utter hatred that a few weeks later found its expression in Hitler’s speech. Significantly, a few days before the Reichstag declaration, Heydrich, in an address to high-ranking SS officers, defined the Jews as “subhuman” and pointed to the historical mistake of expelling them from one country to another, a method that did not solve the problem. The alternative, although not expressed, was not entirely mysterious, and after the speech, Himmler entered a rather cryptic remark in his notes: “inner martial spirit.”13

  How far the reality of the Jews as a “threatening world power” had been internalized at all levels of the Nazi apparatus is possibly best illustrated by a text entitled “International Jewry,” prepared by Hagen for Albert Six, the head of II 1. In its final version it was forwarded to Six on January 19, 1939, for a lecture at Oldenburg (probably at a meeting of the higher SS leadership) on the Jewish question
.14

  The opening paragraph of Hagen’s memorandum was unequivocal: The Jewish question was “the problem, at the moment, of world politics.” After showing that the Western democracies (including the United States) had no intention of solving the “Jewish problem” because the Jews themselves had no intention of leaving the countries of which they had taken hold, and were planning to use Palestine only as some sort of “Jewish Vatican,” the text described the links between Jewish organizations in various countries and the channels through which they were exercising a determining influence on the politics and the economies of their host countries. Hagen’s production bristled with the names of personalities and groups whose visible and invisible ties were uncovered in a mighty crescendo: “All the organizational and personal ties of Jewry, established from country to country, come together in the summit organizations of the Jewish International.” These summit organizations were the World Jewish Congress, the World Zionist Organization—and B’nai B’rith. The mastermind at the center of it all was Chaim Weizmann, whose collected essays and speeches, published in Tel Aviv in 1937, were repeatedly quoted. Hagen’s memorandum was no mere exercise in cynicism. “The Jewish ‘experts’ of the SD believed in their constructs…[for them,] anti-Semitism, which they pretended was matter of fact, scientific, and rational, was the basis of their action.”15

  Himmler, Heydrich, and Das Schwarze Korps illustrate the constant dichotomy of Nazi thinking regarding the Jews during the last months of peace: On the one hand, emigration by all means was the concrete aim and the concrete policy, but there was also the realization that, given its world-threatening nature, the Jewish problem could not be solved by mere practicalities, that something infinitely more radical was necessary. This was the gist of Hitler’s “prophecy,” even if tactically his threats were aimed at intimidating the British and American “warmongers.” One way or another, through every available channel, the regime was convincing itself and was conveying the message that the Jews, as helpless as they may have looked on the streets of Germany, were a demonic power striving for Germany’s perdition. On January 11 and 13 it was Walter Frank’s turn to have his say, in a two-part radio broadcast entitled “German Science in Its Struggle Against World Jewry.” After emphasizing that scientific research on the Jewish question could not be pursued in isolation but had to be integrated into the totality of national and world history, Frank plunged into deeper waters: “Jewry is one of the great negative principles of world history and thus can only be understood as a parasite within the opposing positive principle. As little as Judas Iscariot with his thirty silver coins and the rope with which he ultimately hanged himself can be understood without the Lord whose community he betrayed with a sneer, but whose face haunted him to his last hour—that night side of history called Jewry cannot be understood without being positioned within the totality of the historical process, in which God and Satan, Creation and Destruction confront each other in an eternal struggle.”16

  Thus, alongside and beyond obvious tactical objectives, some other thoughts were emerging on the eve of the war. No program of extermination had been worked out, no clear intentions could be identified. A bottomless hatred and an inextinguishable thirst for a range of ever-harsher measures against the Jews were always very close to the surface in the minds of Hitler and of his acolytes. As both he and they knew that a general war was not excluded, a series of radical threats against the Jews were increasingly integrated into the vision of a redemptive final battle for the salvation of Aryan humanity.

  Throughout the weeks during which Hitler was hinting, in his conversations with foreign dignitaries, at the dire fate in store for the Jews and publicly threatening them with extermination, he was kept informed of the negotiations taking place between German representatives and the Intergovernmental Committee for Refugees set up at Evian to formulate an overall plan for the emigration of the Jews from Germany. The negotiations were in line with the general instructions given by Göring on November 12 and December 6, 1938. Although Hitler was fully cognizant of the progress of the discussions, it was Göring who was in charge of the actual steps.17

  At an early stage, in November 1938, Ribbentrop had tried to play a part in these negotiations, which he had at first entirely opposed, issuing orders to Hans Fischböck, the former Austrian Nazi minister of the economy, to initiate contacts with the Intergovernmental Committee. The Ribbentrop-Fischböck intermezzo did not last long, and in December, Schacht, by now president of the Reichsbank, took over the negotiations with Rublee, first in London and then in Berlin. On January 16, 1939, in a conversation with the Hungarian foreign minister, Count Csáky, Hitler mentioned the possibility of solving the Jewish emigration issue byway of a financial plan.

  Schacht was dismissed by Hitler from his position as president of the Reichsbank on January 20, 1939—for reasons entirely unrelated to the negotiations with Rublee (mainly in response to a memorandum warning Hitler of the financial difficulties resulting from the pace of military expenditures); Rublee, a political appointee, had resigned in mid-February 1939, in order to return to private law practice. The contacts continued nonetheless: Helmut Wohlthat, one of the highest officials of the Four-Year Plan administration, took over on the German side, and the British diplomat Sir Herbert Emerson henceforth represented the Intergovernmental Committee. An agreement in principle between Wohlthat and Rublee had been achieved on February 2. As has been seen, it envisaged that some 200,000 Jews over the age of forty-five would be allowed to stay in the Greater German Reich, whereas some 125,000 Jews belonging to the younger male population would emigrate, with their dependents. (The numbers varied slightly from one proposal to another.) The emigration process was to be spread over a period of three to five years, with its financing to be ensured by an international loan mainly taken out by Jews all over the world and secured by the assets still belonging to the Jews of Germany (approximately six billion RM, less the billion-mark fine imposed after the pogrom). As in the Haavarah Agreement, the Germans made sure that various arrangements included in the plan would enhance the export of German goods and thus ensure a steady flow of foreign currency into the Reich. The agreement was nothing less than Germany’s use of hostages in order to extort financial advantages in return for their release.

  The concrete significance of the agreement depended on the successful floating of the loan and, in particular, on the designation of the countries or areas to which the Jews leaving Germany were to emigrate. Each of the Western powers involved had its preferred territorial solution, usually involving some other country’s colony or semicolony: Angola, Abyssinia, Haiti, the Guianas (now Guyana, French Guiana, and Surinam), Madagascar, and so on. In each case some obstacle arose or, more precisely, was raised as a pretext; even on paper no refuge zone was agreed upon before the outbreak of the war put an end to all such pseudo-planning.

  Thus by means of pressure, threats, and grand schemes Hitler may have imagined that “the Jews of the world” would become pawns in his plans for aggression, because the Jews of Germany were now hostages in his hands.

  On November 7, 1938, while the German Foreign Ministry was still refusing to have any contact with the Intergovernmental Committee and its representative, George Rublee, State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker received the British chargé d’affaires, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, to discuss the issue. “As Ogilvie-Forbes indicated that he personally knew Rublee well from Mexico,” Weizsäcker wrote in a memorandum to Undersecretary Ernst Woermann, the chief of the political division, “I asked him to what percentage was Rublee an Aryan. Ogilvie-Forbes believes that Rublee does not have any Jewish blood.”18 Three days later Woermann himself inquired about Rublee’s racial origins, this time of an American diplomat; the answer was the same: Rublee was unquestionably an Aryan. When, on November 15, the American ambassador, Hugh Wilson, came to take leave of Ribbentrop, the foreign minister felt the need to ask once more: Wilson had to state emphatically that Rublee was of French Huguenot origin and that
not a drop of Jewish blood flowed in his veins.19

  III

  According to the German census of May 1939 and to various computations made since the war, 213,000 full Jews were living in the Altreich at the time of the census.20 By the end of 1939, the number had been reduced to 190,000.21 Strangely enough, a June 15, 1939, SD report indicated that at the end of December 1938, 320,000 full Jews were still living in the Altreich.22 There is no explanation for the inflated numbers produced by the SD (the numbers do not tally with what is known even if accelerated emigration during 1939 is taken into account). Whatever the reasons for these discrepancies, the demographic data provided by the Jewish Section of the SD are nonetheless significant. Only 16 percent of the Jewish population (on December 31, 1938) were under age twenty; 25.93 percent were between twenty and forty-five, and 57.97 percent over forty-five.23 These indications correspond to other known estimates: The Jewish population in Germany was rapidly becoming a community of elderly people. And it was also becoming hopelessly impoverished. Whereas in 1933, for example, there had been more than 6,000 “Jewish” small businesses in Berlin, by April 1, 1938, their number had been reduced to 3,105. By the end of that year, 2,570 had been liquidated and 535 been “sold” to Aryans.24 More than two centuries of Jewish economic activity in the Prussian and German capital had come to an end.

  The daily situation of these Jews was described in a memorandum sent in February 1939 by Georg Landauer, director of the Central Bureau for the Settlement of German Jews in Palestine, to his Jerusalem colleague Arthur Ruppin: “Only the employees of Jewish organizations,” wrote Landauer, “and some people who rent rooms or cater meals are still earning something…. In West Berlin [a Jew] can get a coffee only in the waiting room of the Zoo [Railroad] Station and a meal in a Chinese or some other foreign restaurant. As the Jews’ leases are constantly being rescinded in buildings inhabited by a ‘mixed population,’ they increasingly move in with each other and brood over their fate. Many of them have not yet recovered from the 10th of November and are still fleeing from place to place in Germany or hiding in their apartments. Travel agencies, mainly in Paris, get in touch with consulates that can be bribed—this is mainly true of Central and South American republics—and purchase visas to foreign countries for high prices and enormous commissions. It has often happened that, having suddenly granted several hundred visas, consuls pocketed the money and were then dismissed by their governments. After that, the chances of Jews to enter the countries concerned disappear for a long time. Early in the morning, Jews appear at travel agencies and stand in long lines waiting to ask what visas one can obtain that day.”25